Cognitive evolution and revolution, part 1: #polc09 and a #diversityfail

Politics Online (1, 2) was a great conference, at least from my perspective. Starting with the opening session by Secretaries of State Debra Bowen and Jennifer Brunner, every session I went to had great content. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet friends and colleagues in-person, many for the first time,* and to be on a panel with people like Judith Donath and Clive Thompson. And of course was also a good chance to continue the Twitter *is* a strategy debate and explore progressives’ bizarre resistance to embrace social network activism; more on that soon.

First, though, I’d like to follow up on the experiment in cognitive evolution and revolution I kicked off in the opening panel.

On hashtags and diversity

Jill Miller Zimon’s live blog is an excellent summary of the opening panel. The topic was how the technologies we use shape our thinking — and what impact this has for political organizing online. All the panelists are doing interesting work here and had interesting things to say, and so I hope they’ll accept my apologies for not doing them justice … and that they’ll take the opportunity to blog about the session!

With only a few minutes to speak, I decided to talk about Twitter hashtags … and to invite attendees to experiment with evolving their consciousness in a revolutionary way. My presentation’s available on the #p2 wiki, along with a chunk of references.

In retrospect, I probably should have been more explicit about what this had to do with cognitive evolution. Like wikis and my.barackobama.com, Twitter hashtags are hard to wrap your head around. They’re simultaneously a mechanism for collaboration, a communication channel, name for a campaign, word in an emerging language, tribe (in the Seth Godin sense of the word), and a lot more. To fully take advantage of their potential, you need to evolve your thinking; and the more deeply you get into them, the more your thinking evolves. So it was a great opportunity to give people first-hand experience with cognitive evolution as applied to politics online via the #polc09 hashtag.

In Strategies for progressives on Twitter, Tracy Viselli and I proposed using the #p2 hashtag as a way of engaging with communities that have been marginalized by the progressive blogosphere, and early results have been very encouraging. This session seemed like a great opportunity to continue the experimentation with a different hashtag.

#diversityfail

The next fifty minutes of the session were filled classic examples of marginalization. Like @JillMZ pointed out on Twitter, people largely vanished from the discussion partway through as the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male panel shifted to technology triumphalism … and the usual privileged and techie-elitist perspectives emerged:

APIs and access to data change everything!

The barriers to writing your own application are so low anybody can do it!

It doesn’t matter if technologists ignore issues like class and ableism because if there are underserved niches somebody will fill them!

etc. etc.

Y’know, I’ve seen it enough times that I shouldn’t be shocked … but as always I was. In response to the “somebody will fill the niches” I asked for a show of hands: how many people in the audience emphasized access for people without computers, non-native English speakers, people with disabilities?

Each time only a few hands went up.*

At this point the data-driven guys I was debating with all said “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention! This is something I personally need to be paying more attention to … and I will!”

Just kidding.

The actual response was the hoary chestnut: “well, as long as there’s one application that addresses these issues, that’s enough.” Because, you know, having a broad array of tools to choose from the way all of the panelists do isn’t an advantage that should be shared with others. Or something like that. Sigh.

So while there were plenty of interesting things being said, the panel discussion was a classic #diversityfail.

Meanwhile, on #polc09 …

It sure looks to me that by evolving our thinking and focusing on a Twitter hashtag, we were able to give more voice to perspectives being marginalized in the discussion in the room. And in my closing statement, I wove together @jillmz and @digitalsista’s points from Twitter as well as my own observations — a great example of how hashtags can indeed enable collaboration that countered the matrix of oppressions … just like I said in my opening slide!

So no doubt at this point the data-driven guys I’ve been debating with will all say “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention! Use of Twitter hashtags can counter these kinds of dynamics, just as you and Tracy suggested! And I guess that means we should try to understand your view that Twitter is a strategy rather than mocking it!”

One of the topics that came up a lot was conservative leadership on Twitter — how real it is, why progressives are going to do about it. I got some great insights here from Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton and others I don’t usually get to talk with. It was also a chance to get perspectives on Get FISA Right and Facebook activism from different folks, including Sam Graham-Felsen, Bob Fertik, and Ari Melber.

So there’s much more to talk about. Continued in the comments!

jon

* I hope I was complimentary enough to those willing to tackle these tough issues!

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Comments

Really enjoyed reading this review, Jon – and now that I’ve met you, I can just hear your voice. Why, I think you write like you talk too. 🙂

Thanks for the links too, but mostly, thanks for integrating the thoughts that were being thought and spoken. The conversation will go on – somewhere, multiple sites I hope – and that’s a reason to be optimistic I think.

Thanks for this great overview. I feel like a babe in a new kind of “woods”… a new landscape.

World civilization is in a critical phase transition. Information and communication technology itself and (perhaps more importantly) the social patterns and structures which develop around its various applications (whether by design or accident) will likely be critical both to civilization’s survival as well as to the quality of that survival. In popular terms… are we evolving towards the Borg or the Federation?

You are so right! We must all be social scientists.
Because we are all, in fact, cultural engineers… the only difference is between those who realize it… and those that don’t.

Hi Jon…thanks for summarizing some of the dialogue at POLC 2009. I think it is very interesting and insightful to merge together the many conversations of the conference to be synthesized into a summary of what it all means. With all of our individual tweets and posts, it’s easy to forget the “big picture”.

[…] No One Knows Your Revolution Is a Dog continues the debate. My presentation and followon post on Cognitive evolution and revolution document an example of Twitter as a strategy for diversity in a male-, white- and elitist-dominated […]

Jill, yeah, I do write very much like I talk … except much more slowly. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

Tom, totally agreed that we’re at a transition phase. Will the future we’re transitioning to replicate existing dimensions of oppression or change the dynamics? I do think of myself as a cultural engineer … although also as an artist.

Ellie, agreed that it’s hard to pull back and see the big picture — and this post only covers one perspective on one piece of the big picture. Hopefully the conference wiki will wind up presenting an overview….

On Friday, Brian Wallace’s list of 24 daily Twitter memes on Mashable left out #women2follow. Denise Graveline (aka @dontgetcaught of The Eloquent Woman) tweeted about it. @digitalsista retweeted it to #p2 as a #diversityfail. Allyson Kapin (aka @WomenWhoTech, founder of #women2follow) retweeted. So did many others. Mashable reacted quickly and added it.

Kudos to Mashable for the quick response … and to Twitterers for helping create a #diversitywin! Here’s the tweetstream.

Not to beat this into the ground or anything, but my presentation highlighted @WomenWhoTech and the #women2follow tag as an example of a marginalized group collaborating. Denise, Jen, and I have all blogged about #women2follow and its importance; we’re all core members of the tribe Allyson started up. Other hashtag tribes like #fem2 and #p2 played a role in this as well. And from the #polc09 perspective, Shireen and Jen gave feedback on this presentation; Jill and Shireen were active in the backchannel during the session (and Jill live-blogged to boot); and Jen focused on diversity during a later presentation that Jill also live blogged as Shireen weighed in on the backchannel.

The results here speak for themselves. Within two days, with the aid of the existing hashtag-based tribes, the new #diversityfail/#diversitywin hashtags had their first success — and one that reinforced another diversity-focused hashtag.

So no doubt at this point all the data-driven guys who don’t get Twitter’s importance will say “Wow, Denise, Jill, Shireen, Allyson, Jen, Jon and everybody else, you’re right! Thanks for helping us understand! Twitter hashtags *are* a powerful force for empowerment for marginalized communities, just as you’ve been saying! We will change our behavior in light of this! And I guess this means we should try to understand Jon’s view that Twitter is a strategy rather than mocking it!”

I kinda like being part of a hashtag-based tribe!
Great summation – and I really like links to the tweetstreams that allow us all to hit the rewind button on the *whole* conversation, not just our slice of it.
Life’s pretty magic!

@JillMZ replied on Twitter, adding an important points I hadn’t mentioned:

jillmz: folks need to access/expose themselves to certain spaces/ideas to make such things happen-how do we facilitate that?

Even with the pre-existing connections of people involved, this only happened because we were tracking some common hashtags. How to make it easier for this to happen more broadly, and for people to feel comfortable participating? This is a way where technology, education, and media coverage can help a lot.

Another critical success factor: we all take diversity seriously, and when we see problems work to improve the situation — as Jill said in a followon tweet, we work to bridge divides. Many people don’t. Will they evolve their cognition?

On a related subject, motivational speaker JaWar and I just had an interesting conversation about the importance of highlighting people’s names in Twitter-based communication. It started when I saw one of his excellent TWITTER TIPS:

jawar: TWITTER TIP- Putting RT in front of someone’s name is crediting them with their tweet. RT means retweet.

I replied, saying “good tip” and adding that if you’re changing the wording or trying to call attention to the info, putting “via” at the end is also a useful way to credit. The discussion went from there, and JaWar made a very important point: highlighting the source/person is paramount to keeping the Twitterverse growing organically.

Indeed. And it’s not just on Twitter, this is vital for discussions about the Twitterverse as well. If you look at the slides I chose for the presentation, they’re filled with names and primary sources. Recognizing somebody by name acknolwedges their existence and identity, gives recognition and visibility, and helps people discover each other. Connections build in this way are especially valuable for diverse and geographically-distributed groups who want to collaborate.

Good advice for all of us — and another example of how you need to evolve your cognition to take advantage of Twitter’s potential.

And may I just point out that the quality of dialog between JaWar and me should be a splash of cold water in the face to those who blame their own inability to communicate complex concepts on Twitter on a limitation of the medium?

Jon, I’m glad you put this into perspective for us, and I’m also glad to be in this tribe. I am struck with how randomly this came about, which suggests the opportunity to make it more concerted. I was offline much of yesterday, and only caught the Mashable item late in the day. I know of #women2follow because I happened to be following Allyson (and happened to be watching when she started the tag and picked Wednesday)…*but* as a result, when Mashable posted on follow memes by-the-day, I wanted to find that tag and didn’t. I tweeted in part to call them out and to say, in effect, “not visible to you, maybe, but visible to me and others.” Didn’t know about #diversityfail as a hashtag, but am glad others pounced and delivered.

One thing I’ve observed (and like) about Twitter is that it is naturally random and organic. So we can assume plenty of people, without intent, don’t know about all sorts of things. At the same time, inserting ourselves in the larger discussion is critical. Deborah Tannen has said that we all notice–men and women–when someone is talking more in situations where we are talking less, and that’s clearly what we are noticing here. So we need to talk more. That’s why this discussion, sharing and reinforcement are so important, not only amongst ourselves, but with our circles, being the bridges Jill spoke about.

[…] Politics Online Conference was diversity (see the first of his two-part blog discussion on it at Liminal States ). We mostly talked about two things that didn’t come up in any of the panels — not […]

[…] In The Difference, Scott Page shows the advantages of cognitive diversity. On Twitter, in Cognitive evolution and revolution: #polc09 and a #diversityfail, I illustrated how Twitter hashtags can enable effective collaboration by marginalized groups.*** […]

[…] is a great illustration of the point Tracy Viselli and I have been hammering away on all year (1, 2, 3): Twitter is a place to engage with women, people of color, migrant rights groups, and others […]

[…] Twitter plays an important role in this, making it easier for women to talk with women — and with guys, too. I got to know Allyson and most of the other women I mentioned here via Twitter, and it’s a big part of the way people on all sides of the issue communicated during the kerfuffle. And as @maegancarberry suggested back in 2009, it magnifies the power of groups of people with a few hundred or a few thousand followers who can work together effectively. Yay Twitter! […]

2013 featured some anti-hashtag backlash, for example New York Times social media staff editor Daniel Victor’s Hashtags Considered Harmful. In Nieman Labs’ Predictions for 2014 series, Tasneem Raja (interactive editor of Mother Jones) makes the case that Hashtags Will Matter Again:

But lately, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of hashtag usage that’s got me thinking about the possibilities of the form again. This weekend, for instance, you may have noticed #NotYourAsianSidekick bubbling up in your feed (especially if you follow a sizeable number of people who aren’t straight white men). It was the top trend in the U.S. for much of Sunday, started by writer and activist Suey Park to crowdsource messages about stereotyping and the Asian-American experience. Sample tweets from the nearly 50,000 messages with the tag in just over 24 hours: “The clothes I wear to weddings aren’t for you to wear on Halloween #NotYourAsianSidekick” and “#NotYourAsianSidekick because I don’t co-sign the anti-blackness implied when we’re propped up as the ‘model minority.’” Anyone who’s ever dismissed the possibility of serious discussion on Twitter would have to admit: That’s some real talk. Salon said the tag “ignite[d] massive conversation about race, stereotypes and feminism,” and Park’s “campaign” was covered by the BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera, among many others.

Digital feminism has been busy on the viral hashtag front this year. #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen called out thorny issues of race and class in feminist media, with Gawker site Jezebel drawing much of the heat. BuzzFeed included Mikki Kendall, who started the tag, in its roundup of “30 Women Who Kicked Ass In 2013,” for “bringing race into the online feminist conversation.” (Meanwhile, several sites got dinged on Twitter for initially failing to credit Kendall as the originator of the meme, bringing up interesting issues of attribution and sourcing when covering these fast-moving, viral conversations.)…

Then there’s #blacktwitter. If you haven’t heard of #blacktwitter, you’re missing out on one of the best parts of Twitter. Shani O. Hilton at Buzzfeed describes it as “loosely speaking, a group of thousands of black Twitterers (though, to be accurate, not everyone within Black Twitter is black, and not every black person on Twitter is in Black Twitter) who are interested in issues of race in the news and pop culture and b) tweet A LOT.” Much more than a hashtag at this point, Hilton notes that Black Twitter has been widely credited with bringing the Trayvon Martin case to national attention, the success of Scandal, and the toppling of Paula Deen over racist remarks. More recently, Black Twitter hijacked the #AskRKelly hashtag hosted by the singer and alleged child molester, turning a PR gimmick into a searing conversation on Kelly’s stardom and the treatment of young black women in the broader culture.

In the discussion of Twitter feminism, the deployed language of “toxic” or “polluting” feminism is striking given the desire to reclaim these spaces because they are “toxic” and a blight on Feminism or progressive causes. Just as middle-class whites are returning to neighborhoods, previously abandoned and “left behind” – resulting in environmental hardship – these “crusaders” are now seeking to “clean up” the Internet at the expense of already marginalized voices….

Gentrification is the result of not only policy decisions and economic incentives but also discourse that imagines neighborhoods of color as pathological and criminal, necessitating outside intervention for the good of all. We see the recent efforts to blame “Black Twitter” for divisions, to identify women of color feminism as a “toxic” intrusion, as not only an effort to reclaim these spaces but as attempting to do so while locating the OTHER as the problem….

Sarah Kendzior, who wrote her dissertation on the role of the internet in dictatorship, states in a personal interview, “People use ‘Twitter’ or ‘The internet’ to stand in for the specific groups of people who use online media to try to transform a power structure or challenge dominant narratives. We see rhetoric like this in countries like Uzbekistan, Kuwait or Turkey, where citizens are arrested for using the media their leaders condemn. This is why it is jarring to see similar rhetoric espoused by allegedly ‘progressive’ outlets who claim to stand for disparate values.”

“If anything, I’d say the toxicity is more likely to come from exclusionary politics in feminism – anti-trans, anti-sex worker, that kind of thing – than from marginalized groups pushing back,” she says. And she should know: with articles, Tumblr posts, and Twitter dogpiles devoted to criticising everything from her politics to her methods of speech, Kendall is one of many intersectional feminists who have found themselves branded bullies by the very women seeking to silence them.

She’s also got some great perspectives from Flavia Dzodan of Red Light Politics on intersectionality, including a slogan she coined years ago:

Activist hashtags have started to emerge as an extension of larger activist practice, allowing for conversations, carving out a particular space for a particular decolonial purpose. Examples include #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #FastTailedGirls, #POC4CulturalEnrichment, #NotYourAsianSidekick and many more. These hashtags have allowed for women of color feminists to generate ideas and resist the status quo. Much like our revolutionary ideas, our activist hashtags do not emerge in isolation. They have a specific locality and community that collectively uses experiences to forge new spaces.

Beyond cementing communal ties, hashtags have been called on to draw communities out of the margins and into a visible center — including communities that barely register in mainstream demographic analysis….

When people mourn an inability to have “meaningful conversations,” what they are saying is, “I have not learned to talk to you and don’t feel I should have to.” Katha Politt may see Twitter as a “poisonous well of viciousness and bad faith.” I experience Twitter as one of the few platforms where a man who abused me for years can be challenged openly, and where my experiences as a multiracial black immigrant child are valued internationally. When Nation writer Michelle Goldberg repeatedly attacks Twitter discourse as “toxic,” she misses a basic truth, captured in Brittney Cooper’s brilliant analysis: the emergence of strong and passionate voices of color is not about anything but their own development.

Shanley Kane’s twitter bio refers to herself as Silicon Valley’s last cultural critic. And as one of the tech world’s most prominent feminist crusaders, she’s no stranger to making statements in 140 characters or less. Her writing, and the writing of others that she publishes in the journal Model View Culture, unwaveringly calls out and smartly comments on brogrammer bullshit. From Shit Men Say to Women Founders to Lean Against, her essays are required reading. The CEO and founder of Model View Culture doesn’t dream of a tech future where all women have leaned in. She advocates and highlights queer voices and people of color, an area in which The Women in Tech movement has been exclusionary. We sat down to talk to Kane about queering the tech world, leaning against, and surviving Silicon Valley.

Our education system is elitist, expensive and unequal. It’s also racially and gender-biased. I have learned so much on Twitter about history from a non-white and non-male perspective. I have learned about trans rights, LGBTQ history, African diasporic spiritual systems, critical theory and black queer culture on the platform….

I have learned more on Twitter in the past 8 months than I did in the previous two years on Facebook. Because most things on Twitter are public it gives you access to business, influencers and celebrities in a way that is more conducive to flow and opportunity than Facebook. Information and conversation on Twitter is in perpetual flux and one good retweet can get your writing or whatever else seen by hundreds of thousands of people. It is relatively easy to build a solid audience with consistency of quality and branding.